The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

Saint John took a second slow step, and the kneeling man looked up and snarled. “Fuck off! This whore is ours.”

Ah, and that is how worlds turn. On a word or phrase. Ill chosen and ill timed.

This whore is ours.

This whore.

Whore.

Saint John sighed. Such an unfortunate choice of words. Few words were less welcome to his ears. Not even the tough Aryan Brothers in the cell block had used that word around him — not after his first week in the Supermax. One of them had, but their surviving members passed warnings down the line, to big stripes and little fish. Even though the word was tattooed on Saint John’s own flesh in blue letters on his back, with an arrow pointing down between his shoulder blades to his buttocks. Burned there ages ago by an ex-con friend of his father’s; the act performed back when Saint John was the child Johnnie. Burned into him with a Bic pen, a lighter, and a pin while the boy who was not yet Saint John lay stretched out and bound with duct tape. Whore, it said. Branded fast while his father and the ex-con laughed and belched and spat on each letter as they waited for their dicks to get hard.

The ink had not even dried, the burns had not yet stopped singing their white-hot song, when his father had shoved the tattoo artist aside to show why he had wanted those words put there. The tattoo artist had gone next. And then the other men. A pig roast, they had called it. Friends of his father’s. Men who shared the same appetites.

Men like these men.

This whore is ours.

And now these three men who crouched in the ash around the half-naked woman had conjured with that word.

Whore.

Saint John took another step.

There had been nine men back then, on the day the word had been fixed with boiling ink into his skin. The boy that he had been had survived it and the next day had fled. When he had come back in the night a month later and looked in through the window, he saw the tattoo artist burning those same letters in another child’s flesh. A girl, this time. Gender had not mattered to them. They coveted what they could dominate, what they could force.

Her screams made the men laugh.

As this woman’s screams made these men laugh.

Whore.

Back then, on the day when he had been marked, it was not the first time he had heard that word. Not nearly the first.

But it was the first time that another voice spoke inside his mind.

The Voice had told him to go into a sacred place inside the mansion of his thoughts. The Voice guided him there, and with each inward step the laughter and grunts of the nine men diminished until they were no more than a faint and unimportant background noise.

The Voice had guided him back to the world later, when his body had been cut loose and thrown into the corner between the fridge and the stove. It was there to tell him what to pack and when to run, and schooled him on how to live after he’d fled. It brought him back to the house on the night the men had strapped the girl down, and it spoke great secrets to him when he begged for answers.

He had done everything exactly as the Voice instructed. Saint John later understood that it was the Voice of God, and upon that realization he had begun the transformation from Johnnie to the saint. He was glowing with holy purpose when he returned to his father’s farm. There were always gallons of gasoline in the barn, standing in a row beside the posthole digger, near where a machete hung from its peg. When the Voice of God spoke, the lessons were always simple, always clear. The lessons were about clarity and simplicity.

And about fire. Ahh … fire was such a beautiful doorway.

Saint John took another step down. The cathedral had lovely white granite steps and an archway carved with the austere faces of a hundred saints. Fellow saints, and Saint John wondered if each of them had been given the gift of the Voice. Probably. Why else would they be saints? How else could they be?

The Jock and the Naked Man looked up at Saint John. They looked up from what they were trying to do, shifting their eyes reluctantly from dirty flesh and bitten skin to this annoyance. This intrusion.

Saint John did not move with haste. Haste caused rabbit reactions, quick and defensive. He wanted to see the dog reactions. The jackal reactions. That happened best if he moved slowly, giving each of them the opportunity to make slight perceptual shifts as his personal bubble extruded outward and pushed against the outer edges of their self-confidence. It was very much like subtly shifting to stand too close to a person in a crowd — at first they think you’re leaning in to hear better, to catch every drop of conversational juice, but then they notice that you do not lean away when they’ve finished speaking. That’s when the hound that dwells in the middle of their brain raises its head and lifts its ears to tufted points, sniffing and smelling the wind.

First comes speculation as distances are judged and given value; then confusion as those values are ignored. Then defensive caution as the social bubble pops to demonstrate that it never really offered any protection. It was an abstract bubble after all.

Then comes alarm.

He watched for this in their eyes. The Naked Man was less focused, his eyes continually drifting down to what the Big Man was trying to do. His penis was more erect than the Big Man’s, and bigger, but he was not the alpha of this pack and he knew that he would have to wait. The Naked Man licked his lips in nervous anticipation.

The Jock was the one who looked up at the stranger descending the steps and briefly smiled. Maybe he thought that this newcomer wanted to join in and he was preparing a stinging rebuke. Maybe it was an uneasy smile. Maybe it was a smile that would include an invitation to be the fourth car in this train.

The Naked Man flicked a glance up, then down at the woman, and back up to Saint John. For a moment there was a fragment of shame in his eyes for what he was doing. Not for the woman or her humanity, but for his own participation in something they all clearly knew was wrong. Anarchy did not yet completely own this man’s soul.

Saint John marked that one in his mind. A flicker of remorse in the presence of continued action was not a saving grace. It spoke to understanding, and complicity here was proof of corruption. A man like this would not initiate a rape, but he would always go where a door was opened. There had been men like him on the night that ugly word had been burned onto Johnnie’s skin. One of them had even whispered, “I’m sorry,” as he had hunkered over and thrust. Saint John had spent a lot of time with him later on.

The Naked Man looked away. He was a loose-lipped slobbering buffoon. No muscle tone, skin like a mushroom. White and spongy.

It was the Jock who first realized the danger. As Saint John descended another step toward the screaming thing over which the men crouched, the Jock’s inner hound finally came to point.

“Hey — jackass,” he snarled, “what the hell are you doing? I told you to fuck off.”

Saint John smiled. “You must stop this and go your way,” he said. “Man’s hand was not fashioned by God to lay waste to that which the Lord has made.”

The Jock stared for a two-count and then burst out laughing. “Who the fuck are you supposed to be? Church isn’t until Sunday, dumbass.”

The Big Man paused to punch the woman in the thigh, angry that he was having so much trouble getting hard enough to penetrate her.

Saint John descended one final step. Now he stood above the tableau. The woman’s dirty blond hair cobwebbed the asphalt.

“It is Sunday,” murmured Saint John, but the reply was lost beneath the woman’s screams. Saint John wore white bed-sheets as clothes, the material lashed to his limbs and torso with strips of white tape on which he had written crucial passages of scripture. Not from the Bible, but new scripture the Voice had spoken to him. The sheets were tattered now from all that had happened since the city had begun to burn, and the tatters floated on the hot breeze, like streamers of pale seaweed in a sluggish tide.